You know how sometimes even the most adventurous foodie just fancies cheese on toast for tea – familiar, comforting, English and a little old-fashioned, especially on a Sunday night? Well, it can be like that with television, too. Nothing too innovative tonight, please, no parallel universes or subtitles. Murder, oh yes, you need a dunnit in order to ask who, but not too graphic or weird. The sex should be hinted at, rather than actually done. Endeavour? Perfect.

The Inspector Morse prequel, now in its fifth series, has reached 1968, where the Rolling Stones are on the radio. Not that young Morse (Shaun Evans) is doing much swinging or spending the night together with anyone. Promoted to DS in the new Thames Valley force, he is more sure of himself and grumpier than before, further along the journey towards Colin Dexter/John Thaw’s character. He has no time outside work for much apart from opera and the crossword, certainly no time for the new boy: cocky, young DC George Fancy, whose focus is mainly on what he calls “crumpet” – and he is not talking comforting teatime treats.

Victim No 1, a former boxer, has been shot, then a metal spike hammered into his ear. Ouch. The next, a history don, has been stabbed in the eye with a steak knife. Both eyes. “Eye eye,” says Dr Max DeBryn (I love James Bradshaw’s DeBryn, sort of Endeavour’s Gil Grissom in CSI Oxford).

Murder No 3 tops the lot, or rather does not – he has been decapitated, body left in the bed, head under a silver cloche. For your main course … head of art dealer! We don’t see it, of course – this is Endeavour, not Game of Thrones. We see the disgust on the faces of Morse and DI Thursday (Roger Allam); secondhand gruesomeness.

Turns out these murders are all inspired by the biblical paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi, who turned the horrors of her own life into scenes of women’s vengeance on the men at whose hands they had suffered.

Now, a modern-day (well, 1960s) Gentileschi, Ruth Astor, is exacting revenge on the members of a vile men’s dining club, like something between the Bullingdon and the Presidents Club – worse, even, if that is possible. Never has murder seemed so just or such fun. Go on, one more, he is the worst of the lot, rock to the skull, bash.

Has Endeavour suddenly found relevance in the real world, then? Let’s not get carried away – it is a whodunnit, but a clever and excellently crafted one (by Russell Lewis), with plenty of whydunnit, too. I like Shaun Evans’s new pricklier Morse and the lovely period detail: not just the cars and the telephone exchange, but in the attitudes of the day.

So, familiar, maybe, and comforting (as comforting as murder can be). But it is also really good. If it were cheese on toast, it would be made with the finest English cheddar and there would be some kind of pickle.

***

Arena: Stanley and His Daughters (BBC4) is an extraordinary documentary. The painter Stanley Spencer’s daughters – Shirin, 91, and Unity, who was 87 at the time of filming – talk about their lives and their father. It has not always – or ever – been easy. For many reasons …

Because they did not spend their childhoods together. Shirin was sent to live with a relative, who never returned her. “And Mummy didn’t have the courage to ask for her back,” says Unity, as if her sister were a casserole dish.

Because Spencer left their mother, Hilda, for Patricia Preece, who was a lesbian, and so he continued to commit what was now adultery with his brokenhearted ex-wife. It is hardly surprising that she never recovered. “You deserve to have a murdered person tied to your back for ever,” Hilda once wrote to Spencer.

Because they always lived in the vast shadow of their father, of his work, his genius. (Like Endeavour, I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like and I love his self-portraits.) To some extent, they lived in the shadow of Jesus Christ and the resurrection, too.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Shirin once went to live in Africa, in order to get away from her family, or that today the sisters are sometimes a little tetchy with each other, although they also seem to have found a kind of redemption and peace.

Seemed to have found, I should say – Unity died soon after filming last year. Francis Hanly made this strange, moving, funny, sad film just in time.